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Melissa Anderson

Tomatometer-approved critic

Reviews

Movies TV Shows
Autumn Leaves (1956) 91% EDIT “[Joan Crawford's] acting is at once immoderate and fiercely controlled; her face, as stylized and exaggerated as a Kabuki mask, still conveys a vast repertoire of intricate moods and responses. Burt’s descent into madness chills. ” – 4Columns Jan 23, 2026 Full Review Marty Supreme (2025) 93% EDIT “...Marty Supreme also marks an ignominious first in the Safdie cosmos: a shamelessly sappy ending, with the egomaniac protagonist somehow transformed into a caring, doting, weeping man. The conclusion is no less than a Supreme sacrifice.” – 4Columns Dec 19, 2025 Full Review The Secret Agent (2025) 98% EDIT “...The Secret Agent abounds with corpses and specters. It also teems with charismatic performers and indelible faces—mugs that effortlessly recall those from the decade rendered.” – 4Columns Nov 22, 2025 Full Review Peter Hujar's Day (2025) 92% EDIT “Peter Hujar’s Day reminds us of the pleasures of looking and listening intently.” – 4Columns Nov 8, 2025 Full Review The Mastermind (2025) 90% EDIT “Reichardt’s is one of the rare recent films to take place during the era known as the long 1960s in which the epoch’s mood, style, and culture are conveyed potently yet unobtrusively. ” – 4Columns Nov 6, 2025 Full Review Afire (2023) 91% EDIT “Flashes of humanizing vulnerability do little to expand a one-dimensional portrait of indignation and arrogance. Despite the title, nothing ignites in Afire.” – 4Columns Jun 30, 2023 Full Review Neige (1981) EDIT “Filmed in the Pigalle and Barbès neighborhoods, this neo-noirish tale provides a glimpse of Paris rarely seen...capturing dynamic street life, [it's] urban verité, a funky city symphony...a loose ACAB platform firmly on the side of the oppressed.” – 4Columns Jun 23, 2023 Full Review Will-o'-the-Wisp (2022) 97% EDIT “Motored by carnal action as much as by personal crises and emotional disintegration, João Pedro Rodrigues drolly explore the terrain where XXX meets existentialism...No matter how weighty the theme, though, Rodrigues is never one for sanctimony.” – 4Columns May 26, 2023 Full Review The Wounded Man (1983) 91% EDIT “Chéreau excelled at modestly scaled portraits of people coming undone by their needs, particularly when they can’t articulate them. That’s especially the case with The Wounded Man....a film of potent, unsanitized eros.” – 4Columns May 19, 2023 Full Review Unrest (2022) 87% EDIT “If this film about anarchist fervor has the stately, serene aura of a diorama, its notion of time as inherently subjective—a fantasy as inconsistent and obsolescent as the national borders that the anarchists sought to erase—proves far more stimulating. ” – 4Columns Apr 28, 2023 Full Review Trenque Lauquen: Part II (2022) 100% EDIT “In the town named after a round lake, pointed romantic triangles proliferate. Of one of her darlings, Laura says, “I lost the fear of getting lost, of dying.” It is an exceptionally romantic line in a movie that is one of the greatest romances I’ve seen.” – 4Columns Apr 14, 2023 Full Review Trenque Lauquen: Part I (2022) 96% EDIT “I find myself reluctant to give even a perfunctory synopsis of Trenque Lauquen, since many of the film’s delights emerge from the deliriously original plots and subplots that Citarella and Paredes have concocted.” – 4Columns Apr 14, 2023 Full Review Drylongso (1998) 100% EDIT “Low-key yet capacious, Drylongso is an affectionate art-school razz; a study of female friendship; a reflection on gender, race, & violence; a murder mystery; and a portrait of Oakland. Among its many pleasures, it reveals the unexpected in the everyday.” – 4Columns Mar 17, 2023 Full Review Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) 80% EDIT “Just as the line demarcating reality (which here is always slightly askew) from fantasy is dissolved, so, too, do identities become porous.” – Village Voice Mar 2, 2023 Full Review Pacifiction (2022) 88% EDIT “A hallucinatory, disquieting, languid epic, Pacifiction willfully disorients. Prosaic plot specifics are ancillary to creating unfading images; it's concerned more with sensation than sense. What tethers us to the film is Magimel’s superb performance.” – 4Columns Feb 10, 2023 Full Review Saint Omer (2022) 95% EDIT “This immensely intelligent film ... exposes a host of limits—of empathy, self-knowledge, language, cultural understanding—while it expands into infinite possibilities regarding the timeworn genres of the courtroom thriller and the immigrant tale.” – 4Columns Jan 13, 2023 Full Review The Super 8 Years (2022) 92% EDIT “As much as the film acts as a complement to Ernaux’s previously published work, it also affords a unique pleasure: moving-image evidence of the woman in that transitional moment just before and after her first three books were released.” – 4Columns Dec 16, 2022 Full Review Armageddon Time (2022) 77% EDIT “Clotted with stumbling attempts to expiate guilt via easy ironies and stock moments of indignation, Gray's film is defined by flaccid political outrage, by a tidy didacticism about what the malevolent practices of four decades ago have wrought today.” – 4Columns Oct 28, 2022 Full Review Tár (2022) 91% EDIT “That Tár, for the most part, engages intelligently with highly charged sociopolitical issues that have fueled innumerable idiotic think pieces is just one of its many pleasing surprises.” – 4Columns Oct 14, 2022 Full Review Blonde (2022) 43% EDIT “Blonde is ghoulishly obsessed with Monroe’s pregnancies and reproductive organs. Shots of floating fetuses fill the screen so often that I wondered whether Operation Rescue had invested in the film.” – 4Columns Sep 30, 2022 Full Review Moonage Daydream (2022) 92% EDIT “Morgen too often indulges his aggravating instinct to cut away from his captivating subject to bombard us with enervating frippery. Desperately, manically trying to draw us in, his ill-conceived Bowie bauble succeeds only in pushing us out.” – 4Columns Sep 16, 2022 Full Review We (2021) 80% EDIT “With a light, deft approach, Diop lays bare France’s gruesome, maddening postcolonial history simply by being a patient observer...Motored by Diop's curiosity and compassion...her film is clear-eyed but not cynical, hopeful but not mawkish.” – 4Columns Jun 17, 2022 Full Review Aimée & Jaguar (1999) 90% EDIT “Impassioned -- if occasionally overwrought.” – Out Magazine May 24, 2022 Full Review The Tsugua Diaries (2021) 78% EDIT “A work of quarantine ingenuity, The Tsugua Diaries is a late-summer idyll that both acknowledges the grim circumstances that shaped its making and incorporates discord without ever faltering from its low-key ebullience.” – 4Columns May 13, 2022 Full Review Diva (1981) 97% EDIT “Beineixs film delights, if not overwhelms, the eye. (And in its obsession with the beauty and power of the human voice, Diva might also be thought of as an illustration of the cinéma du listen). Its bewitchery hasnt dimmed more than forty years later.” – 4Columns Apr 29, 2022 Full Review
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